Schola Europaea European School Brussels II

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PANORAMA
The objectives set for Distance Education,
a term encompassing both distance
teaching and learning, for the 2004-2005
school year and on, was to continue
the development and implementation of
computer-assisted communication in the
European Schools. High-quality in-service
training for the Distance Learning projects
needs to continue, as does evaluation of
the technical and pedagogical aspects of
distance teaching and learning.
(Ref: 2004-D-372-en-4).
By their presence in the surrounding digital
world, the European Schools have become
a preferred test-bed for new technologies
by many of the major providers of soft-
and hardware. The European schools now
find themselves at the ‘cutting edge’ of ICT
LEARNING GATEWAY
As a partner in the iClass project, it was
necessary for the project team to invest in
a management tool to be used during the
project that could also fit the European
schools in the future. Learning Gateway,
which is a collaborative portal for sharing
all kind of digital files and supporting
complex rights management according to
users' identities, was chosen as a tool
that could facilitate and share instructional
best practices, collect student assessment
data and deploy instructional resources
quickly and efficiently. This tool has builtin
collaboration capabilities that facilitate
communication with students, parents and
other European schools. All participants
can have at anytime and anywhere access
to information presented on this site. The
Learning Gateway can give students and
parents the chance to participate directly in
the learning process by enabling them to
reach resources and lesson plans as well as
opening the way for parental involvement.
development in Europe and beyond. It is
still the case, however, that schools are not
exploiting the technologies and applications
which they already have available to their
full potential. This is the challenge which
Directors and ICT technicians face in each of
the schools.
Classroom Management Platforms (e.g.
Class Server, Studywiz) do allow a certain
level of differentiation and personalization of
a learning path for pupils. Sometimes, students
can be actively involved in their own learning
process (iClass project) although most
systems on the market have not reached that
level of ‘intelligence’ yet. Generally, teachers
can better deliver and organize traditional
learning content to students using ICT.
Teachers can share their educational
resources with all their colleagues in all 14
European Schools. Each teacher can also
share a private class website that will be
visible only to the students enrolled in his/
her class. As the platform is Web-based, it
is accessible from any computer connected
to the Internet.
The Learning Gateway is still far from
reaching its optimal possibilities, even
though the platform is very stable and has
been warmly welcomed in the European
school community. It has already a huge
number of users and hosts thousands of
documents. But in some schools teachers
still have difficulties entering it and using it
as a pedagogical tool.
In the primary schools it has been used to
share the “Carnet scolaire” and to open
up the school to parents. Regarding the
secondary schools, the Baccalaureate
Unit, in close collaboration with secondary